Many products or services have a need to configure numerous computers with configuration settings or files; however, these users do not want to perform updates as many times as they have servers or in direct correlation to their number of network servers. The present methods allow updating to be performed once, but configuration and distribution can be performed dynamically to all servers. Anyone who runs a web-hosting service, network, or the like can experience this problem. For example, a user can imagine upgrading graphics for their web-site, which is hosted on ten servers or defining certain interface policies that apply to all interfaces in a network.
Thus, a need exists for a software process that can be run on each server which requires an updating or needs to be configured. Each server has one or more roles that are defined for the server in a central data-store that can be read by the software process. Based on the role(s) of the server the software process is running on, defined tasks can be performed by reading a central data-store and populating the proper parts of the server.
The present embodiments meet these needs.